The Coalfields of North Spain

It’s going to be very difficult to condense my 3 weeks in Spain into a readable blog entry, but I’m going to try and hope that I do this period of time some justice.

I started with a harrowing two-day journey from Edinburgh, Scotland to the plane that would take me from London to Madrid, Spain, followed by the bewildering experience of navigating the Spanish capitol’s subway system to arrive at my translator/travel partner Maggie’s apartment in the old working-class part of town. Some friends in Whitesburg, KY had put me in touch with Maggie a few months ago when I had asked if they knew of anyone who could help me with a chunk of time in Spain. Maggie is from the US originally but has lived in Madrid for the past 10 years. She works as a professional Spanish to English translator to pay the bills, but spends most of her time getting involved with interesting projects (like this one which definitely deserves support). Luckily she found my Watson Fellowship project to be something worthy of donating a couple of weeks to. I somehow found my way through the narrow, cobblestoned, steep, winding old city streets to the door of her flat, and soon we were having a traditional Spanish lunch in an old hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Before long we were back on the subway to travel to our first interview of the trip with a woman that was deeply rooted in the Spanish coalfields.

Anna, the mother of a friend of Maggie’s, was from a long line of coal miners from the region of Asturias. She was very interested in talking to us when she heard that someone from America wanted to learn about coal mining history in Spain, but nothing could have prepared me for the intensity of the experience I was about to have. Maggie and I emerged from the subway station to meet Anna and her mentally handicapped daughter (who I didn’t know was coming), and immediately Anna launched into a rapid string of conversation with Maggie. First I should mention a few things: one, I was running on barely any sleep from having a crazy schedule of buses and flights over the past couple of days. Two, this was the first time I had been in a non-English speaking country and I was still adjusting to the fact that barely anyone spoke my language. Three, Spanish culture is very different from American or for that matter British; people love to talk a lot, they speak very fast, and they like to be close to you, look deep into your eyes, and touch you as they talk to you. All told it was a very surreal and bewildering experience that I found myself in the midst of.

I knew very little about Spanish history or Spanish mining before coming here, but I began to learn very quickly. The coal miners of this country have a long and very strong tradition of labor organizing and struggle, much like miners in the US and the UK. However, Spain had a very brutal civil war from the years 1936-1939 that ended with 36 years of a fascist dictatorship. The miners had been some of the most radical anti-fascist activists and fighters before and during the war, which meant that they were prime targets for capture, torture, forced labor, and execution. Prior to the war Spain had been seen as one of the most progressive countries in the world for union activities and workers’ rights; the mines were able to secure an 8 hour work day and good pay in 1919. During the 36 years of the Franco dictatorship it was illegal to unionize and they lost all of their previous labor rights victories, but many clandestine strikes and actions took place anyway. It wasn’t until the regime was almost over in 1972 that any new labor agreements were signed between workers and the industry, and this was only after 2 years of intensive demonstrations and strikes in 1969-1970. Franco died in 1975 and for the first time in 36 years a democratic government was possible. Once again unions were able to flourish, and Spain is possibly one of the most pro-union places in the world.

Anna didn’t actually tell me all of that, but I thought that I should at least set the background for the journey I was about to set out on. She did tell me loads about guerrilla fighters in the mountains, miners that went missing to never be seen again, how many in her family had been miners, and lots and lots of stories. Unfortunately I couldn’t understand a word of it as she stared at me intently and pointed to various family pictures and old magazine articles, and she was so wrapped up in telling the stories that she seldom gave Maggie a chance to translate any of it. I still felt like I was having a connection with her, but it was strange to have it in such an abstract way. By the end I was completely mentally exhausted.

Before going further I feel like I should explain a bit about the goal of my time in Spain and indeed for this trip in general. I originally wrote my Watson proposal with the thought that I would mainly try to spend time gaining experience with specific types of projects that I think could be part of a solution for a more sustainable Appalachia, such as community-scale biomass energy, value-added organic agriculture, and land remediation. Since I’ve started, I have been much more drawn to finding places that mirror Appalachia in other parts of the world in order to broaden my perspective on the issues that are currently facing us back home. Ideally I will find innovative solutions within some of these “parallel Appalachias,” but I have to realize that more often than not I will have to go to other areas to find the solutions. The time in Spain ended up being much more about having a parallel experience than about finding solutions, though I certainly did try for the latter.

Maggie and I left the next day to drive 4 hours north of Madrid into the coalfield mountains of north Leon. It was very dramatic to see the landscape change from the mostly flat, arid plains and mesas of middle Spain into the looming rocky mountains. I remember coming down the main mountain pass at dusk and thinking that it looked quite a bit like coming down Pine Mountain in Letcher County, KY. We initially stayed at a place that we had been told was something of an organic agriculture training institute, but this ended up not being the case so much. From there we drove on up through the mountains of Asturias to the city of Gijon, where Maggie had a few contacts we hoped could prove useful. They were quite helpful, and soon we had a general plan of where to go and when.

Before getting down into the coal mining mountains of Asturias (a region that borders Leon and which is in north-central Spain), we spent a few days in Gijon and also in Ovieda, the capitol of the region. After a mildly interesting meeting in Ovieda we wandered up the street into a situation that was a bit unexpected. In front of the main parliament building in the center of town, about 200 people were gathered holding banners and looking rather stern. With some guesswork and help from Maggie, I realized that this was a pro-coal mining rally with Spanish banners saying things like “Bring a Carbon Capture Plant to Asturias” and “For the Future of Coal, Sign the Decree!” A union leader gave a speech out of a bullhorn, followed by a few rounds of deafening noise makers.

The people we had been meeting with before the rally then took us on a brief tour of the historical parts of the city that ended at a very old-school Spanish restaurant. Apparently you can only get a real meal in Spain between 1:30pm to 3:30pm and luckily we were in that window. This “lunch” is called a “menu,” and it’s meant to be a massive meal that you center your entire day around. Most people eat a little toast and have some coffee in the morning, stuff down a huge “menu” in the middle of the day, take a nap or drink strong coffee afterward, and then have a small “dinner” around 9-10pm with some drinks. This whole arrangement was another shock to my system, but the food (lots of oil and pork!) was quite satisfying.

The lunch conversation was largely focused on the event we had just witnessed and the background behind it. Apparently Spanish coal mining is no longer economically competitive with cheaper imports from Poland, Russia, and India. In order to keep the mines alive and miners employed, the industry has to be heavily subsidized by the government in the form of decrees that require power plants to burn a certain amount of Spanish coal. Since Spain is part of the European Union (EU), they are bound by agreements and decrees that come out of Brussels in Belgium that affect all of the countries in the EU. The EU generally doesn’t like policies that allow countries to focus on their domestic economies in favor of international trade, and it’s also trying to phase out any policies that promote the use of coal. In about a week and a half, the EU would decide whether to allow Spain to continue to subsidize the use of domestically-mined coal until 2014 or whether to cut it off immediately. Lots of pro-coal rallies and hunger strikes were therefore planned for the lead-up to the Brussels decision day of September 29^th.

One other twist that I found interesting was the split between state-owned coal mines and privately owned (for-profit) coal mines in Spain. Apparently about 30% of the total mines are state mines (known as HUNOSA), and the rest are owned almost entirely by one guy named Victorino Alonso. He is something of a mafia-esque character with close ties to top politicians, and he is known for using unsavory tactics to get what he wants. We were told that he has refused to pay his workers for the past couple of months, saying that he will go bankrupt if the EU doesn’t sign this decree and that the workers need to stage massive demonstrations to pressure them into signing it.

We drove from Ovieda back to Gijon for an Asturian renewable energy conference that someone had emailed Maggie about. It was taking place at a big fair and conference center which happened to be hosting a big genetically-modified cattle show at the same time; it was kind of like the Kentucky State Fair but much smaller and weirder. The conference wasn’t too impressive to be honest. The presentations were very boring, almost nothing was about actual projects or real plans to do anything, and there were no really innovative ideas proposed. We spoke to a couple of the presenters afterward about my project to try to find leads for worthwhile places and projects to check out, but while people were quite nice they didn’t have any concrete suggestions to offer for things happening in the region to transition to a more sustainable economic and resource base.

After a nice bit of time checking out the Asturian coast line, we found a route to take us down into the coal mining valleys of the mountains to the south. Again the change in landscape was quite striking. From the lush rolling hills next to the sea, we were soon driving into the Spanish Eastern Kentucky. Before long the hills were much steeper and heavily wooded, the roads windier, and the homes a bit more run down but with lots of character. When we finally saw our first coal tipple, I would have felt like I was back home if not for the Spanish barrel tiles on the roofs of the houses. Then it was one tipple after another, sometimes with the familiar conveyor belt structure spanning across the road. Eventually we made it to our destination for the evening, the home of Luisa.

Luisa is the mother of one of Maggie’s good friends, and she is a 78 year old widow of an Asturian coal miner and comes from one of those families where pretty much everyone was involved in mining. She was one of the most pleasant people I’ve ever met and was delighted to have a young man in the house that she could cook enormous meals for. She told me lots of very interesting stories that I couldn’t understand, and sometimes Maggie would be around to translate but other times we would have fascinating conversations that were mysteries to us both. Sometimes she would ask me a question, and then repeat it louder and louder with the hopes that I would eventually understand, but to no avail. Even if I had known basic Spanish it probably wouldn’t have helped since Asturias has its own very distinct dialect that is mostly Spanish but also has lots of unique words and sentence structures. Maggie described it as somewhat “Yoda-like” (Ran to the store the boy did; Going where are you?).

The next few days were spent exploring the area and going to some meetings that ended up being quite productive. We spent an hour of time with the historian for the main mining union (CCOO) and it wasn’t nearly enough; I could barely keep up with the rapid fire onslaught of information. Benjamin was very friendly, surprisingly young and hipster-ish, from a long line of miners, and wanted to give us tons of books (all in Spanish of course). My brief notes are a page and a half long which I can send to anyone who’s interested, but I’ll just bring up some of the highlights here. Spanish union history is filled with anarchists, communists, and more centrist groups that all managed to work together under some very harsh conditions as described earlier. Black lung has been pretty much eliminated in Spain because underground workers only have 7 hour shifts and they’re strongly encouraged to wear breathing protection. For every year that a miner works, they earn 1 ½ years of retirement, so that lots of people retire when they’re about 45. Most coal in Asturias is at a very steep slant because of the way the mountains were formed. A lot of the mining is still fairly manual with a pneumatic hammer type of thing, but bigger mines have longwall sections now. HUNOSA doesn’t do any surface mining because of the damage to the environment, but Victorino does. He also gets away with using non-union labor by hiring short term “construction contractors” for all of the heavy machinery instead of actual miners. Most of this activity is in north Leon.

We also met with a member of the Green Party in the Asturian parliament who likewise had huge amounts of information to relay. Enrique had lots of interesting perspectives on the big-picture situation of coal in Spain and transitioning the coalfield regions to newer ideas, but it seemed as though many of his good ideas and well-written plans were being more or less ignored. Apparently the electric companies in Spain would like to switch from coal to natural gas since they have constructed some expensive new gas-fired power plants that are barely being used. However, Spain has no domestic natural gas and instead imports it from unstable places like Colombia and Algeria through the mega-company Repsol. There are plenty of issues around poorly reclaimed surface mining and illegally mining land without permission by Victorino’s company. The Greens have put forth plans to parliament to develop a distributed renewable energy economy in the region that would focus on job retraining for former miners. The plans have been approved, but no action taken because of the influence of the huge power companies that want to retain control of power sources. There is quite a bit of renewable energy in Spain but very little in the coalfield areas. Even where renewables exist they are mostly huge projects that are controlled by the same huge companies that own the coal-fired power plants. Everyone knows there’s a pressing need to transition the economy and energy base of the region, but lack of will is preventing anything from really happening.

Before leaving Asturias to go to nearby Leon, Maggie and I made a trip over to a working HUNOSA mine to get a tour and even to go underground. Unfortunately when we arrived a belt had just caught fire, so we only got a tour of the outside area from a young engineering intern. He could actually speak a little English, so for once I was conversing a little with someone other than Maggie. We did get to meet some Spanish miners who were just coming off shift, and to my surprise there were a couple of female miners among the crew. Maggie had some good conversations with a few of them, then we got to go up into the big pithead pulley gear towers (almost all underground coal mining in Europe is deep shaft mining, so they have to use these massive cable and pulley systems) and finally into the control room where the guys seemed quite happy to have a girl to talk to for once. One fellow thought we should stick around for the protests they were going to have in the next couple of days; he was really looking forward to setting things on fire in the streets.

The drive to Leon was another exercise in dramatic landscape changes. The transition from the green, medium-height hills of Asturias to the tall and almost alien-looking arid mountains was quite intense and then it was back to green forested mountains but this time they were much taller. I had fallen asleep in the car and woke back up in the town of Villablino. Maggie was talking on the phone with a member of the Green Party who we thought we would meet with in this town, but apparently he was in exile now after he had been physically threatened on more than one occasion for trying to stop an illegal surface mine on a nearby mountain. As I looked around I could have sworn we were in West Virginia, and I wondered if this area would be as polarized and conservative as some people had warned.

We stayed in nearby Ponferrada that night but ended up back in Villablino the next morning as we followed our couchsurfing host German up to his job as a forest fire lookout guy on a mountain tower above the little mining town. After taking in the massive view, we decided to spend a day getting out into the mountains and drove over to a forest reserve that was supposed to have some of Spain’s last bears. No bears to be found, but it was nice to just get out and be in the nature of the area. I think we both needed to air out a little bit too; it was actually a bit stressful for both of us to be trying to more or less plan this trip by the seat of the pants while also dealing with another person. We also got to stop at a pub in a sleepy little town where the bar was held up by old coal wagons and talked to the owner’s son about the lack of opportunities in the area and how he pretty much has to move to Gijon to be able to have a career even though he’d prefer to stay in his home village.

After the hike we went back to Villablino with the intention of talking to local people about the situation around the future of coal mining in the area, but first we decided to take a detour to a nearby mountain that had been strip mined for coal and then abandoned. It was very surreal to drive up the steep windy mountain roads to the yard of abandoned heavy equipment and then to hike on up to the higher parts that had been mined; again it was almost a little too familiar. To be honest this didn’t seem anywhere near as serious as Appalachian surface mining. The mountain was more or less resculpted to the original contour and it wasn’t as expansive as the strip mines I grew up around, but it was still striking to see something so similar halfway across the world.

After driving back into town and finding a little bar that looked pretty “working class,” we picked out a couple of guys for Maggie to go talk to. The first was a very recently retired miner, which surprised me because he didn’t look any older than 40. He had a very interesting perspective on things, not at all the hard-line pro-coal agenda some people had said we would encounter here. He said that everyone has known for a long time that coal mining has a very limited future here, and that the government has done a piss-poor job of finding real alternatives for the economy of the region. He thought that most people would definitely support renewable energy jobs since they’re desperate for pretty much anything, and that most folks are definitely in favor of protecting the local mountains. Afterward she talked to a much older retired miner, and to my recollection he more or less echoed some of the same sentiments.

The next day was set to be a day of pro-coal rallies in medium-sized cities across North Spain in anticipation of the decision for whether or not to sign the EU decree to extend Spanish coal subsidies for another 4 years. Ponferrada was one of those cities, so we decided to spend the whole day there talking to people before the rally and then being in the middle of it. Maggie was very good at having very direct, frank, and revealing conversations with miners and their families, and we learned that they are very aware of the many facets of their situation and quite capable of accurate analysis. It was strange to hear them acknowledging that Victorino Alonso is basically manipulating them into staging these demonstrations to pressure the EU into signing the decree that will keep their jobs viable but also that they are protesting and organizing against his backhanded tactics. They also acknowledged that coal is a dirty fuel and that we need to be moving to renewables, but as long as Spain is going to continue to burn some amount of coal then it should be Spanish coal and not shipped in from thousands of miles away.

These miners had walked for dozens of miles from their home villages, and they would be walking dozens more to the capital town of Leon. We walked a mile or so with them, and it was a strange feeling to be in solidarity with these people that reminded me so much of people back home but also knowing that their livelihoods would only be around for another 4 years at the most. In a way it was gratifying to hear so many of them say that they wanted alternatives for their communities since I am proposing the same for Appalachia, but it was disheartening to see that so little had actually been done in this direction when they are so seriously needing it.

We headed back to Madrid the next day, bidding the coalfields of Spain goodbye. I spent a few days exploring the city and eating weird food from different countries before spending way too much money on bus tickets to Zaragoza and then to Huesca. I wanted to briefly check out a renewable hydrogen energy project in the brown coal area of Aragon before moving on to Germany.

The Hydrogen Foundation had been suggested to me by Enrique in Ovieda as one of the only innovative projects in a somewhat coal-related area that he was aware of. This group of young engineers is working on ways to develop innovative approaches to hydrogen technology that use 100% renewables as the energy source. The hydrogen would be used not only for vehicles in the future, but they are also looking at using it for large scale stationary power storage so that intermittent power sources (like solar and wind) can be used to charge a hydrogen fuel cell bank and then discharged when the power is needed. This could also be used to send hydrogen through a pipeline to remote villages in the Pyrenees mountains where small local generators would create power where it’s needed. These are ideas that I had not considered before, and I wonder how they could potentially be relevant to a decentralized renewable energy future in Appalachia. The other aspect I really appreciated was the fact that everyone on staff there was between 25 and 35 years old and were all from the Aragon province. If I can manage to put projects together when I return to the US, I would definitely like to follow this model.

My next to last day in Spain was spent wandering around in the midst of a mind-numbingly massive amount of people in the streets of Madrid. This was the General Strike, a once-in-a-decade phenomenon where everyone in every kind of job across the country is supposed to go on strike for the entire day. This time was in protest of the most recent wave of EU labor policies that have made unions weaker and opened up the way for more cheap imports, at least from what I could tell. I don’t think there’s too much point in going into tons of detail for this day, but I will say that it was strange to be in the midst of a humongous protest in a foreign country that I felt very little connection to when people that I know very well were in the midst of this protest back home in the good old USA. I ended up feeling very alone in a sea of thousands of people.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to adequately sum up the little bit of Spain that I experienced. The people were consistently very friendly, even if I couldn’t speak their language at all. Everyone was very forthcoming and frank, and seemed to be quite happy that someone from so far away was genuinely interested in their situation. I felt like the parts of Asturias and Leon that I spent time in mirrored Appalachia very closely in several ways. There wasn’t a great amount of material wealth, and people who had lived hard lives through very tough working conditions were very proud of their culture that had grown up around this shared past. At the same time, that reality was rapidly changing and nothing concrete was coming in to take its place. It seems that this is a common theme for mining areas. The other theme so far has been that everyone wants to see some type of alternative jobs appear, but even in countries and regions that have progressive ideas (such as renewable energy and organic agriculture) those ideas seldom make it to the places that need it most, such as the coalfields. I hope that these lessons can be transferred back home to Central Appalachia so that we can find ways to make this transition happen for us rather than to us.

A Wee Visit to Scotland

I arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland on the wrong train which I was luckily not kicked off of and which to me exemplified the non-wisdom of a privatized train industry in the UK. If there was one national train company that coordinated everything and which all the trains belonged to then you wouldn’t have two trains going to the same place 5 minutes apart and owned by two completely different companies. Also they probably wouldn’t be so bloody expensive. Anyway, I digress.

My first official stop was at the UK Biochar Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh’s south campus. Andrew Cross, one of the main soil science researchers there, had very kindly and promptly responded to my emails about wanting to check out this world-renowned research center. I received a fairly thorough tour of their newly-built dedicated facility, comprehensive descriptions of the various ongoing projects, and introductions to the team members who were available. I felt acutely out of my league and a bit self-conscious talking to these folks who have an international reputation as one of the leading places for cutting-edge biochar projects, but all of the researchers except one were graciously willing to give me a bit of their time to talk about their work, my travel fellowship, and future projects I intend to undertake on surface mined lands in Appalachia. This one exceptional fellow constituted the only time so far on this trip when I have felt about 2 inches tall when leaving a room; he basically said that if I wasn’t going to pursue a PhD with him or spend at least 6 months working with one of his project partners then it wasn’t worth his time to talk to me or share contacts. I suppose a humbling experience can be good at times, but I’d like to think that I’ll never let prestige go to my head (assuming I eventually execute some successful projects) and cause me to have a rude attitude toward inexperienced young people who have an interest in my field of work.

The next day was spent on a bit of a non-project trip to the area of Glamis, about 12 miles northwest of Dundee. This is the place that my mother’s side of the family is supposedly descended from, and I felt like I^th or 9^th earl in the family of the Earls of Strathmore, which were semi-royalty that had lived in Glamis Estate and Castle since the late 1200s. Only the first son receives inheritance and becomes the next earl, so the story goes that he left in a rebellious rage and falsified records in Virginia to show that he had been born there so that he could fight for the American army. The Lyon family in Kentucky has been mostly poor subsistence farmers and manual laborers until the most recent generation, while the Lyon family (now Bowes-Lyon due to some political bargaining in the 1790s) in Scotland continues to occupy this massive castle and 40 acre estate. should at least see this place that has become enshrined in Lyon family mythology. According to our records, our furthest back traceable ancestor is William Lyon, who came over from Scotland to fight in the American revolutionary war and was awarded a tract of land in Johnson County, Kentucky for his service. He was the third son of the 8

It was a strange experience to ride through the ornate gate and half-mile driveway to the castle where I ended up paying full price for the inside tour after unsuccessfully trying to bargain on account of being a distant cousin. I’m not really a fan of royalty and the obvious superiority and class divisions inherent in such a system, but I tried to suspend that for a bit to take in this place that may well have been my ancestral home. It’s difficult to describe the odd feeling I harbored as we walked through opulent halls filled with classical portraits of the former earls, gigantic fireplaces, ridiculously ornate beds, and the one section of the castle that dated back to the 1300s and which was quite spooky (all stone walls, floor, and ceiling, heads of various animals all over the place, pieces of weapons and suits of armor here and there). Apparently this was the castle where Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” was set. After the tour I tried to find William Lyon on the family tree displays in the main area, but apparently they don’t pay too much mind to the non-inheriting members of the family. After strolling the gardens and forest area around the castle, I undertook a harrowing journey of confusing buses and a late train to get back to Edinburgh.

The fellow at Tower Colliery in Wales had mentioned that there were quite a few former mining towns close to Edinburgh, so Thursday I set out to find them and hopefully have some random interesting occurrences. That morning I came across the Scottish Mining Museum in Newtongrange on the internet which seemed like as good a place to start as any. I wandered around the free bits of it for awhile before going into the gift shop area and striking up conversation with a fellow who had worked 37 years in the pits and now served as a tour guide for the underground mine part of the museum. It was more of the same unfortunately; Maggie Thatcher shut the pits down with no plan for the future, the old culture of these mining towns is gone, and now the former miner’s cottages have become commuter houses for outsiders who work in Edinburgh and don’t want to pay high rent in the city. He did suggest an interesting pub that I might meet some good people at and also a nearby town that was worth visiting.

The Dean Tavern was the only example I’ve come across of a community benefit pub, i.e. the profits are all returned to benefit the local community. Apparently this is a Swedish concept known as “Gothenburg” and the Tavern dates back to the late 1800s when it was started as a miner’s tavern by the resident coal company but then gifted to the community by the early 1900s. It was a bit too early in the day to find old miners to get stories from, so I chatted with the bartenders for a bit about the history of the place and the current situation of the town.

Roslin was the next stop, which I didn’t realize was mainly known for its association with “The Davinci Code.” Honestly I know next to nothing about the book, and apparently I was the first non-local anyone had met that came to the town for a reason other than to see the chapel that’s mentioned in the Davinci Code. I happened past “The Original Rosslyn Hotel” which was across the street from “The Roslin Hotel” and was not a hotel at all but a pub that featured some very colorful local characters. After asking a couple of friendly-looking older gents if they knew of any former miners that hung around there, I was immediately pointed over to a table with a guy that was a bit haggard and shaggy-looking and a couple of somewhat more well-kempt friends. The shaggy haired guy was apparently the one to talk to, but I was advised that the problem wouldn’t be getting him started but rather shutting him up.

Before I knew it these fellers were buying me pints and talking about the good old days of working in the pits, fighting police in the strikes of ’84-’85, random adventures they’d had in times away from the mines, and arguing about pointless things in a particularly abrasive and humorous Scottish fashion. They were all interesting guys in their own right, but the shaggy haired one (affectionately known as “Shuggy”) was a definite standout. We ended up back at Shuggy’s place for some Scotch with coffee and to pass a guitar around and trade songs. Shuggy and one other guy were actually really good musicians, and I got to hear everything from 30s jazz, fingerpicked folk, and a traditional Scottish mining song. I in turn played some old time Appalachian songs (including “Only a Miner”) and they at least acted like they were really into it. I had to take off to get the last bus back to Edinburgh, but that was surely a standout experience on this trip so far. Shuggy even gets his own profile story on the “People” section of this blog, whether he likes it or not! (he wouldn’t tell me his full name because I couldn’t fully convince him that I wasn’t some kind of spy or undercover agent)

I spent a couple of days in Glasgow just to see the place that so many had referred to as the sketchy, run down, industrial side of Scotland, but I found it more endearing than Edinburgh in a lot of ways. There was way less of a touristy international vibe; it was authentic, crazy, gritty, occasionally drunk and scary Scotland at its best (and worst). I won’t go into too much detail of my shenanigans here, but I will mention that I randomly found an authentic ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee) with live musicians on the third floor of a beautiful pub in the middle of the city. Ceilidh is the Scottish version of a square dance (or maybe square dance is the Appalachian version of a ceilidh), and there were definitely intoxicated brash young dudes in kilts whirling and twirling with young lasses, as well as older folks and a few random international student types. By the time I got up the nerve to ask somebody to dance they decided to do the Virginia Reel to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy;” not exactly what I was hoping to get out of a Scottish traditional dance experience, but it was a good time anyway.

I finished out my Scotland (and indeed UK) time with a generic day-long guided minibus tour of the highlands. I forgot to bring my camera with me, but if you google image search “Scottish highlands” I’m sure you’ll get plenty. While it was a fairly run of the mill tourist affair, I was glad to at least get a glimpse of this area that I’d always heard of as being the place that so many Appalachians are descended from. I knew very little of the history of the area starting out, but Dave the tour guide kept on with a constant stream of jokes and information that I assume was at least partially factual. I was particularly struck by the whole Jacobite revolution and the following “Clearing of the Highlands,” which is both heartbreaking and also the reason behind much of the Scottish immigration that has largely shaped my home region. I couldn’t help but wonder if possibly some of my ancestors are from this area even though we don’t have official records of it; I kept getting an eerie feeling of familiarity while driving around the Scottish holler backroads in this minivan filled with Indian, Japanese, Dutch, and other assorted tourists. We finished with a tour of the Dewar Scotch Distillery, which was especially interesting on account of the multiple free samples. For the record Dewar’s isn’t very good; I would recommend Laphroig if you can find it.

One week was definitely not enough time to really get to know Scotland. If I didn’t have lots of other places to be (and if it wasn’t so blasted expensive) I would’ve loved to check out some of the isles off the north or west coast, the really mountainous highlands around Aberdeen and Inverness, and also the burgeoning micro-hydro industry in some of these areas. In the end, I’m on a focused travel fellowship, not a vacation, and I was beginning to feel guilty about losing some of that focus by the end of my time in the UK. I’ll spare you the soap-boxy rant on how I feel about the UK’s approach to coalfield transition and community-based efforts to transition to a sustainable energy economy, mostly because I already did it in the last post. I can assure you that the next post about my time in coalfield Spain will be very different and most likely much more interesting.

My plans were much more vague as I readied to leave Wales and head into the Northeast England coalfields of Yorkshire. I had been told that there were lots of former mining towns in this area, so I spent the next several days in and around York, Doncaster, and Sheffield.

York is best known as a touristic historical small city with loads of Viking and Medieval sites, though there are both former mine sites and renewable energy projects in the surrounding area. I soon found out about a former coal mine site about 8 miles away that’s slated to be turned into a “renewable energy park.” After attempting to get in contact with the development group heading the project with no luck, I made a visit to see if any progress had been made. It was a pretty grim sight when I was there; all broken glass, mangled fences, and busted up concrete, but apparently the site has already been purchased by Science City York and it’s slated to have construction start in the next few months. According to this recent press release, they are planning on having a 5MW anaerobic digester and a 22MW biomass gasification system there; this is very much along the lines of the type of coalfield redevelopment work I hope to do when I return to KY. Otherwise the town was a very tourist-friendly example of old-world British charm with a healthy dose of creepy Medieval torture-related attractions.

The next stop was Doncaster. Whenever someone had mentioned this town to me, it was usually referred to as somewhere to be avoided if possible. It was once a major coal mining area and I was interested to see how an English former coal mining town compares to the Welsh valleys. I didn’t quite expect what I found. A nice family directed me to the site of the old mine works and coal slag tip; I didn’t see it initially and had to get directions from a local fellow walking his dog in a nearby park. The slag tip, once I found it hidden away in a wooded park, was basically just a big long mound with patches of stunted trees and grasses mixed in with rocks, much like a strip mine in Kentucky. Beyond there was the location of the old shaft mine pit works, which had once been massive. There was absolutely no trace of it now; it was as if it had never existed. In its place was a big, generic, newer-looking council estate (AKA housing projects) with bands of bored and listless teenagers roaming about. To be honest the town was much bigger and nicer than I expected. The South Wales valleys were much rougher and more run down, but I actually preferred them as they seemed to have more individuality and charm.

The next day I met with Henry Wilson, one of the main directors of ReGro, a farmer cooperative based out of a small town near York. Most of the Yorkshire countryside is typical flat farmland with lots of square fields of hay, corn, and wheat. This group was formed with the sole intention of working with local farmers to establish commercial scale willow plantings to supply the feedstock needs of a nearby power station that has a commitment to burn a certain amount of local biomass along with coal. This coop has developed over the course of 12 years and now includes 45 growers in the Yorkshire area. They purchased a modified sugarcane harvester from Australia which is owned cooperatively and taken around to the different farm sites to harvest the 3-4 year old willow stands in the winter. We talked about the myriad issues and aggravations that it has taken for ReGro to develop a viable biomass energy coop business in the UK. Henry was very keen to provide consulting services to people and groups seeking to set up similar systems and avoid the challenges that they have had to face over the past decade. I am hoping to get something vaguely similar going on the strip mined areas of Appalachia, though I’m personally looking at more of a diversified native agroforestry approach that doesn’t require chemical inputs and which doesn’t use land that could be growing food crops.

I then left the Yorkshire region and headed up to the town and surrounding area of Durham. This turned out to be a fairly small and well-preserved town, with a central area that looked to be circa 17-18th century and a massive old cathedral that was quite awe-inspiring to be inside of. My first meeting was with Ray Hudson, a professor-turned-administrator who had specialized in the social history of labor struggles, especially regarding the UK coalfields. Dr. Hudson came from a coal mining family near Durham, and he was very down to earth right off the bat.

As we talked over some Thai food that he graciously treated me to, the realities of what had happened to the coal mines in the UK finally began to click. The coal mining industry here was nationalized (made part of the government) in 1947, largely because of strong union efforts to create a safer and more secure workplace. However, this eventually became their undoing. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she started to actualize the hopes of many conservative capitalists and the fears of workers and labor rights activists by pushing through legislation to privatize many sectors of the economy that had been nationalized in decades past. This included steelworks, ship building, the national train system, water companies, and coal mining. In order to make this plan a reality, the conservative Tory government had to take on and destroy the extremely strong federation of miner’s unions which propped up all of the other unions.

A long and very violent battle between miners and imported police ensued during 1984-1985 when the mine unions called a national strike that ultimately ended with the severe weakening of the unions’ ability to exist, organize, and call strikes. During this time some legislation had been passed allowing Britain to source abroad for cheaper imported coal and steel products. By the end of the 80s, the UK coal industry was nearly extinct. In no way did this mean that Britain no longer burned coal or that their reserves were gone; on the contrary, they still have quite a bit under the ground and continue to burn massive amounts of coal to this day (in addition to having a huge nuclear program), but it’s mostly shipped in from Poland, Russia, and Australia.

One final aspect that I found striking was the fact that the union miners had staunchly opposed the onset of open cast mining (i.e. surface mining) in the 1970s and 80s. The open cast operations were run by private construction and haulage companies rather than the national unionized mining group, and it was seen as a direct threat to their jobs. Overall this goes to show that situations like this are rarely black and white, good vs. bad, environmentalist liberals vs. pro-employment conservatives. The Thatcher government was very dedicated to promoting private capitalism at all costs, and ultimately this was the reason behind the closure of UK’s coal mines, not the rabid environmentalists that the US coal industry would like to blame for any and all layoffs. I would argue that short-sighted economic policies like these have vastly disrupted working-class communities all across Britain. I honestly don’t see how the argument can be made that it’s cheaper for the country to import coal when the former miners and their descendents are largely relying on government unemployment checks. The cost of supporting people who could have been working surely has to exceed the savings from importing coal from abroad; nevermind the social cost of tearing away the fabric that held these communities together with nothing else to take its place.

I decided to take a bus to some of the old mining towns around Durham to see what the present day reality of the area looks like. In Fishburn, I met some very friendly older folks in a pub who pointed me to where the old mine works used to be. This town at least had a memorial to the miners in the center and a few scattered old coal buggies that now had flowers planted in them. Just like Doncaster there was a scraggly slag tip on the outskirts, and there was a desolate attempt at an industrial park on the site where the pithead used to be. I then went to Trimdon Grange, where the only trace of a coal mine I could find was a big wheel that was once used to raise and lower men into the shaft which had been converted into a piece of playground equipment. Seaham had some kind of weird modern art sculpture that was meant to be a monument to the miners of the past which had details of the town’s mining history inscribed around the base. This town once had underground mine works that extended 6 miles under the ocean floor, and apparently ponies were used in the mines until the 1980s.

One thing I couldn’t help but notice on the bus ride was the presence of massive wind turbines all around the farming landscape that surrounded the post-mining towns. Whenever I went into a pub I asked the people (especially former miners) how they felt about wind energy in a former coal mining area. The responses were uniformly ambivalent; no one seemed to care one way or the other. The locals all said that there was little to no local employment provided by the wind farms, and that they were supposed to be putting profit back into the community for “regeneration” projects but they didn’t know how or if that was actually happening.

I stopped off in Newcastle on my way up to Scotland to meet up with some professors that I had only found out about a day beforehand. This trip has been quite tricky to plan out; I feel like I could spend all day in front of a computer figuring out where to go and finding the cheapest tickets to get there, but then I barely get the chance to just get out and explore an area. I’ve had to strike a balance between randomly chasing leads and coming across contacts and then hoping that I can manage to track them down during the brief period of time that I am in their area. It turns out that some very innovative work is happening at Newcastle University which is right up my alley; I just wish I had found out about it earlier.

Dr. Bilsborrow with the agriculture department was kind enough to give me about an hour of his time to talk about the Center for Renewable Energy from Land, or CREEL for short. This project is actually quite similar to the work going on at Aberystwyth University in Wales, wherein a diversity of biomass inputs are optimized within a multi-faceted energy production system. The particularly interesting part about Newcastle Uni is that they are just now beginning a portion of this project that is focused on making use of land that was previously surface mined for coal to produce bioenergy crops while also rebuilding soil quality; basically exactly what I have been planning to do in Kentucky. It was particularly justifying to meet a well-regarded scientist in another part of the world that has had more less the same ideas as me. We agreed to stay in touch throughout the future to keep updated on eachother’s projects, and there may even be the opportunity for cross-continent research collaboration.

I boarded a train up to Edinburgh, Scotland after my meetings in Newcastle, thereby ending my brief bit of time in Northeast England. I didn’t find this area quite as interesting as Wales, but I did thoroughly enjoy my time here and the people I came across. It seems as though the end of the mining era hasn’t hit this area quite as hard. The colliery towns are either near big population centers that still have some job base left (i.e. Leeds, Sheffield, etc.) or they’re pretty close to some nicer university towns (i.e. Durham and Newcastle). There also wasn’t the same presence of former worker housing that had turned into ghettos with angry and frustrated youth roaming around. Overall it seemed like the mining identity was less strong here than in South Wales; there was the resentment toward the Thatcher era beatdown, but people seemed to have just accepted that this is the way things are now.

Possibly other reasons exist for the disparity in how bad off the old mining towns are in South Wales as compared to England, but I would be purely speculating. Maybe the UK government is less concerned about development in Wales; maybe there has been more of an inherited culture of dependence on large, monolithic employers there. Either way, there was definitely less concern about preserving that history of a mining past in England. The issue that I still haven’t quite processed is how a people can virtually forget within a generation what their past was largely based on for over 300 years. In Appalachia, we constantly hear about how coal mining is our heritage and culture, and without it we have nothing. We’ve only really been mining back home for 120 years; some of these places in the UK first started in the 1600s. Apparently it is possible to suddenly no longer have mining as an employment base and not starve to death, but it seemed to me that it comes at a high social cost to jerk the rug out from under these communities without planning ahead for some kind of economic and cultural conversion.

Sustainability Projects Around Mid Wales

I left the South Wales colliery valleys knowing that it had been an important experience, but feeling bereft from not having found any real solutions for a place that has given so much and received so little in return. My next stop would be the much more progressive area of Mid Wales, with a couple of specific spots in mind.

Overall I was hoping to start finding some examples of positive projects that could be applied to coalfield area regeneration. The first stop was the Center for Alternative Technology, or CAT for short. This place was recommended to me by some friends in the States who are ex-patriate Brits that had worked at CAT for about 6 years (we met at the Don Blankenship vs. Robert Kennedy Jr. debate in Charleston, WV of all places). CAT was started in the early 70s by a small group of creative idealists and legitimate engineers who took a landscape that consisted mainly of the leftover “slag tips” from slate mining and turned it into a multi-faceted institution of research, education, and ecotourism. It now has a global reputation as a very innovative and unique center that integrates many different sustainability-related themes under one umbrella.

As I wandered about the place, I was struck by all of the professional-looking displays that tackled most of the possible facets within renewable energy, organic agriculture, woodland management, and general sustainable living. Maybe I had expected more of a hippy look to the place, but overall it seemed quite normal and presentable to me. Kids were playing with displays about passive solar design and micro hydropower, parents were checking out timelines about the development of wind energy, and volunteers/interns were pushing wheelbarrows around while working in the on-site gardens. I ended up getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the old slate mine and the mountains that overlooked the place from a couple of these interns, and later found myself on the nearby beach for a stunning sunset.

I met up with the director of the place, Paul Allen, on my second day there to learn about the history and inner workings. Apparently everyone who works there (including Paul) makes the same salary, which works out to about $25,000 per year. It’s also controlled by the workers with no overarching CEO calling the shots. The constant stream of interns and volunteers (most on 6 month placements) bring an evolving set of new ideas to the place which helps to keep things fresh and interesting. In general the place has been financially sound over the years, though it is a constant effort to ensure economic well-being. They are very lucky in that they get a lot of visitors due to their proximity to the touristic destinations of the West Wales coast and the North Wales mountains (visitors are charged about $10 to come in and walk around for the day). CAT has been involved with some large-scale policy work recently, such as the “Zero Carbon Britain” report that serves as an environmental/economic stimulus package recommendation and the work-in-progress film called “Power and Place” which aims to position Wales as a potential leader in the new “eco-industrial” revolution, just as it played a major role in the original industrial revolution.

As we talked in the pavilion under a roof of solar panels, a couple of things kept going through my head. CAT has successfully built a very innovative institution that is quite inspiring and could serve as a model for many other rural communities and places that have been dependent on extraction, just like Wales. At the same time, there are some real issues that have to be examined to be able to relate this to the real world. First, the solar panels, wind turbines, hydropower, and biomass boiler systems have all largely been possible because of grant funding and support from the UK government and wealthy liberal English donors; I have to wonder how long it will take for the solar panels to pay for themselves with all of these cloudy Welsh days and how that can translate into the lives of the average person living in the area. Second, I couldn’t help but notice that very few if any of the visitors while I was there were actually Welsh; they were nearly all middle class English liberals on vacation.

I’m less concerned about the first point than the second. Renewables will eventually be competitive as the cost of fossil fuel extraction continues to increase; in the meantime I think it’s a worthwhile use of taxpayer and philanthropic money to help get pilot projects off the ground so that people can see what possibilities are out there. However, I do think that it is very important that local people in rural areas be reached out to, especially when they wouldn’t normally be apt to check out a “green” project that was put in place by outsiders. One staff member at CAT remarked that if the local Welsh people weren’t coming then it was their own fault since they now had free admission to the place whereas tourists have to pay. That may be, but sometimes you have to make a bit of an effort to bring people in who wouldn’t otherwise take interest.

While still in the Machynlleth area, I met with a long-term employee of Dulas, a CAT spin-off company. Started back in the mid 1970s to commercialize a solar-powered vaccine refrigerator that a CAT engineer had designed, this for-profit company has grown into a world-leader in the design/installation fields for commercial-scale solar, wind, hydro, and most recently biomass technologies. They’re one of the most established and respected company in the UK for this kind of work, having written the field guide for wind power surveys, installed solar and hydro systems for rural electrification all over the world, and helped to pioneer legislation to make renewables more viable. Dulas has a worker-owned structure where all employees own shares and receive dividends based on how much they work, and is arguably one of the largest companies in the world with this structure (around 75 employees). They managed to have over 1 million GBP in profit last year, all while contributing a significant portion of their time and energy to humanitarian efforts and local workforce training in the areas where their installations are done, ranging from remote sections of Africa to low-income areas in Wales.

The final place to visit in Wales was Aberystwyth University. A retired professor at Bangor University (back at the beginning of my trip) had mentioned that his daughter is working on biomass energy here, and before I knew it Kerrie had organized a full tour of the work going on at Aberystwyth for me. This place has a very diverse and comprehensive set of departments working together on energy crops, biomass energy processes, and the economic viability therein. I felt very lucky as 4 different research scientists showed me around their respective projects, ranging from pyrolysis, anaerobic digestion, willow and miscanthus breeding, and cellulosic ethanol. The approach here was focused on the most efficient way to make use of a variety of agriculturally-based inputs in a way that generates the most energy and creates the most beneficial byproducts. This is exactly the kind of system that I would like to set up when I get back to Kentucky, so it was very nice to see that other people are thinking along the same lines.

It was a bit strange to leave Wales at the end of 5 weeks. The place felt strangely home-like, and I was beginning to feel the vortex that could suck me in and keep me here for another 6 months if I let it. I'm sure that I could continue to dig up more and more interesting places, people, and projects if I continued to stay, but the same could be said of anywhere that I'll be stopping on this trip. With that, I will leave you with this nugget of wisdom about the many contributions Wales has made to world history.